CANNES – The biggest barrier preventing advertisers from investing more in premium video isn’t pricing. It’s clunky technology, said Dan Pantelo, founder and chief executive of creative automation platform Marpipe.
Speaking with Beet.TV’s Lisa Granatstein at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Pantelo argued that modern marketers are used to the seamless self-serve interfaces of social platforms like Meta, TikTok and Snap — something that traditional premium video environments still lack.
“Paid social is easy, accessible, even fun to spend money on,” Pantelo said. “You don’t have to go through layers of account reps or insertion orders, processes leftover from linear TV.”
Bringing e-commerce adtech to premium TV
Marpipe’s solution? Bring the self-serve efficiency and creative automation of paid social to the world of connected TV. The company specializes in transforming massive product catalogs into customized, high-performing ad creatives.
“Brands give us spreadsheets with hundreds of thousands of SKUs, and we turn them into personalized video ads for every product,” Pantelo explained. “Then we plug into ad platforms to make sure the right creative hits the right person at the right time.”
Until now, that capability didn’t exist in premium video. But at Cannes, Marpipe announced a partnership with Universal Ads to roll out dynamic product and catalog ads to connected TV for the first time.
“This is standard for paid social. But there’s never been a way to plug your product feed into premium TV. Now there is,” Pantelo said.
Scalable creative, no humans required
Pantelo envisions a future where performance marketers can run personalized, measurable campaigns in premium video just as they do on social platforms. And the scale is enormous.
“If you’re a brand like Nike with 380,000 SKUs, we’re creating 380,000 product videos — automatically,” he said. “They update dynamically based on what’s trending, what’s discounted or what’s getting the best reviews, without a single person touching it.”
Pantelo sees this kind of real-time creative diversity as essential to any future-ready video strategy. While others focus on measurement, he believes Marpipe’s edge is giving advertisers a way to match the right message to the moment — at scale.
“This is a whole new world of creative possibility,” he said. “And now it’s available on premium TV.”
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